New Delhi: India has offered a “final” trade deal to the US with the aim of removing the retaliatory 25% tariffs imposed by the Trump administration due to Indian import of Russian oil, the Hindu reported.

India has offered to immediately remove tariffs on the import of almonds, walnuts, apples and industrial goods as part of the larger Bilateral Trade Agreement. 

“India has offered the US team a revised deal. This is the final offer that India can make,” an anonymous source in the Union government was quoted as saying by the paper. 

The official added that efforts were aimed towards removing the additional tariffs. “Indian exporters have told the government that they can deal with 25% tariffs since the lowest global tariff is 19%, but 50% tariffs are hurting,” the official said.

Indian exporters are currently absorbing the higher tariffs to retain US customers, resulting in lower profits, a second official told the paper. The official added that traders believed this was an easier alternative to losing US customers and attempting to reacquire them later.

US trade representative Rick Switzer was in Delhi for two days until December 12. However, Union commerce minister Piyush Goyal said that Switzer’s visit was not related to the trade deal negotiations. Meanwhile, US trade representative Jamieson Greer told the US senate Appropriations Committee that the offers India has made to the US recently were the “best we’ve ever received as a country”.

The Indian government has “sincerely” urged the US government to remove the additional tariffs, the report said.

“The two teams of negotiators have broadly done what they can, the ball is in Trump’s court to accept the deal or not,” the second official quoted by the paper said.

US keeps India out of mineral supply chain coalition

While the India-US trade deal remains under a cloud of uncertainty, India has been left out of a US-led initiative, Pax Silica, to build a secure supply chain of critical minerals and energy inputs among other things.

The inaugural Pax Silica summit will include Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, UK, Israel, the UAE and Australia, a US state department statement said. “Together, these countries are home to the most important companies and investors powering the global AI supply chain,” the statement added.

According to the statement, partner countries will focus “on securing strategic stacks of the global technology supply chain, including, but not limited to, software applications and platforms.”

“Rooted in deep cooperation with trusted allies, Pax Silica aims to reduce coercive dependencies, protect the materials and capabilities foundational to artificial intelligence, and ensure aligned nations can develop and deploy transformative technologies at scale,” the state department said.

“Countries affirmed a shared commitment to pursue projects to jointly address AI supply chain opportunities and vulnerabilities in priority critical minerals, semiconductor design, fabrication, and packaging, logistics and transportation, computing, and energy grids and power generation,” it added

New joint ventures under the initiative will include building trusted technology ecosystems, including ICT systems, fibre-optic cables, data centres, foundational models and applications.

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